So how long can you technically wish someone a happy new year? The same people who smiled when I wished them a happy new year the first week of January now give me a funny look when I wish them the same all these weeks later.
And yet I hope we’re still talking about any commitments we made for the new year. We hear it all when the phrase “new year’s resolutions” comes up. I’ve met some people who say any time of year is good to make a change; we shouldn’t wait on life changes until January. Their lives in January look much like December. Others are devoted to January resolutions and a word for the year and all of those conversations where we commit to changing or improving our lives.
For us as Christians, our spiritual disciplines are usually at the top of the list. Many of us probably made commitments to pray or read the Bible more or in more meaningful ways for 2024. Wherever you landed on that spectrum as the year began, I hope you’re in a good place with the sacred rituals you practice before God.
Moving from Transacting with God to Abiding with Him
My friend Lisa Reddy recently helped me process spiritual disciplines in a new and more encouraging way. She uses the analogy of vehicles. We often think of our lives as cars and reference being out of gas to mean our connection with God is weak. That mentality leads to the idea of consuming God, maybe even using church in a selfish way to refill our lives with enough of God to get through more of life. Instead, Lisa compares our lives to trains that run on an electric rail. The issue is not how much of God we store or consume but how closely we are connected to God, our source.
That concept can rescue us from a consumer mindset we often take to our faith. Our walk with God should not be a series of transactions where we do certain things to please God (and people) to get Him (and others) to give us things we want. A healthier and more mature view is to understand our walk with God as a relationship. Lisa stressed reseeing our connection as being about abiding in His presence rather than performing in certain ways. Naturally as we are connected to Him, it will shape how we think, behave, and live. But first and foremost we have to prioritize connecting to Him.
The True Source of Our Fruit of the Spirit
Let’s take this concept a step further. All of us know that a growing Christian’s life should be marked by fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22). Yet if we’re not careful, we can make the fruit the goal and not God Himself. What if we understood God to be the giver of the fruit rather than it being something we produce?
When Paul described the fruit of the Spirit, His ultimate call was for us to “live in the Spirit” and “walk in the Spirit” (Galatians 5:25).
Rather than focusing on being more loving, more joyful, more peaceful, and so on, my focus should be on connecting more closely to God so that His Spirit at work in me yields the fruit.
Moving from Willpower to Surrender
So our part is to position ourselves to connect more closely to God. Prayer and other spiritual disciplines are a natural way to do so. Yet if we’re not careful, even though we know we are saved by grace, we can revert to our own works and performance in the way we approach spiritual disciplines. Yes, I make the choice to pray and build spiritual practices in my life, but I must balance that and not turn it into a performance.
I think grasping this concept is so critical for a long-term, healthy, sustainable walk with God. I told someone a few years ago in a season of reevaluating and growing in my walk with God: “I am not interested in trying to build up a superhuman level of willpower to try to achieve the most disciplined of spiritual disciplines.” I get that there will be days I may not feel like praying but I do so anyway because I value my relationship with God and prioritize sacred practices. However, if we set that up as the ideal and position it almost as an expectation that spiritual disciplines are a result of our human willpower… Think about what we’re saying. We’re making prayer more about us than God.
My connection to Him is not because I’ve dutifully gritted my teeth and endured a requirement of disciplines. He invites me to abide in Him.
In fact, consider this passage in light of how the fruit of the Spirit works in our lives: “Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me. I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing” (John 15:4-5).
God will produce fruit in our lives when we are focused not primarily on our works we can do to be considered a Christian, but on abiding in Him. In our desire to abide in Him, I will naturally want to position myself in a way to connect most closely to God. I will surrender things that inhibit me from connecting. Yet even in that process, instead of viewing it as my checklist of things to do, I view it as a point of surrender so God can then have His way in my life. He imparts His holiness and empowers us as we walk with Him.
The call to be led of the Spirit is part of our ongoing walk with God. We didn’t bring about our own salvation and we can’t bring about our own sanctification and fruit of the Spirit. As we surrender to God, He helps us in the journey to abide in Him. Our lives are most like Him when we focus less on our own willpower and focus more on making God the object of our pursuit.
For More on This Topic
To hear Lisa Reddy describe being Spirit-led in our spiritual disciplines, check out this episode of The Wholyness Podcast.
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